They’re Spying on US!!
Dec 16th 2005RavenAnti-America
The headlines will piss you off. It’s all over the Internet.
STORY OF SECRET NSA POWERS PROMPTS BUSH DEFENSE
BUSH REPORTEDLY ORDERED NSA TO SPY ON CITIZENS IN US
Just look around at the headlines. It’ll make you wonder what country you live in. How DARE President Bush allow these things to happen. The source of the outrage is an article published by the one and only New York Times. The reporters of this article, along with the editors of the Times, have known about this hot spot of a story for well over a year now. At the request of the WH the Times put off publishing the story…until today. Is there a reason for this particular day? It wouldn’t have anything to do with changing the focus of positive voting in Iraq yesterday? (That doesn’t deserve headline status).
I read the story, it’s long and you’ll need a big cup of coffee or a bottle of Jack to get through it all. For starters, this is what you’ll read, the horror of it:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
In 2002, President Bush toured the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md., with Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was then the agency’s director and is now a full general and the principal deputy director of national intelligence.
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
THIS is wrong. No president should be authorizing such things. American citizens don’t deserve to be spied on unless there is a very good reason, and with a warrant.
Reading further along I got a little suspicious:
What the agency calls a “special collection program” began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism. The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The C.I.A. seized the terrorists’ computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said.
In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said.
Under the agency’s longstanding rules, the N.S.A. can target for interception phone calls or e-mail messages on foreign soil, even if the recipients of those communications are in the United States. Usually, though, the government can only target phones and e-mail messages in the United States by first obtaining a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which holds its closed sessions at the Justice Department.
WAIT a minute. THIS isn’t as bad as the headline made me think it would be. It took this report 16 paragraphs to slip this in…that most of the spying activities took place between suspected terrorists and their friends…here in America and abroad. I have no problem with this at all.
Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their international communications, the officials said. The agency, for example, can target phone calls from someone in New York to someone in Afghanistan.
Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that calls from that New Yorker to someone in California could not be monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court.
So there we have it. The headline of the day seeks to cause an uproar, and it has. But if people read the article from start to finish they will see it’s no where near as bad as it first sounds. In fact, what is reported here makes me feel safer as an American. To know my government will go to the trouble to follow email addresses and phone numbers from California to some Tim Buk Too nation in the middle east is a good thing. To catch terrorists and their nasty plots ahead of time is a good thing.
Why the NYT chose to publish this today instead of say, after the holidays or last week even, is up to anyone to guess. Perhaps the leftist old lady wanted to alter the outcome of well known Patriot Act hearings today…or maybe they wanted to remove the focus of the elections in Iraq. Eiher way, this is a perfect example of how the media can alter opinions and start dangerous rumors just by the headlines it choses to print. Shame on the NY Times…
Cross Posted @ ARS
No Comments »
